Episode 1: Laurie D. Graham & David Huebert

Laurie D. Graham’s first book, Rove, was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Poems from her second collection, Settler Education, published last month by McClelland & Stewart, were shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and won the Thomas Morton Prize. She is an editor of Brick magazine, a teacher at Fanshawe College, and she hails from outside Edmonton.

In Settler Education, Graham explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake—the death of nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. With language at once terse and capacious, Settler Education reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present.

David Huebert is the author of the poetry collection We Are No Longer The Smart Kids In Class (Guernica 2015). His poems have appeared in journals such as CV2, Vallum, Event, Prairie Fire, and The Dalhousie Review. His fiction has won The Antigonish Review‘s Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize, The Dalhousie Review‘s short story contest, and, most recently, the 2016 CBC Short Story Prize.

We Are No Longer the Smart Kids in Class is a smart and spirited debut volume. These are bawdy, wryly confessional, warts-and-all poems that celebrate language and love, family and nature, the cerebral and the sensual. Occasionally drunk but always observant, Huebert’s narrators contemplate life’s mysteries with their head in the clouds and their pants around their ankles. A pornographer of the heart, Huebert shies away from nothing. His voice is authentic and raw and is sure to give the Canadian poetry scene a much needed slap in the face.